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Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Way less condescending because he isn't trying to offer a solution to something that is your domain of expertise, but

Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Way less condescending because he isn't trying to offer a solution to something that is your domain of expertise, but it also says he doesn't care if you think it's not feasible right now. Think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible. This often needs to be said because people tend to jump to the conclusion that it is too hard before they take time to think about possible solutions.

klabb3 2y ago
While I agree this is an improvement, and that it respects the agency of the worker, it’s not enough. Pushing true boundaries may in rare cases be catalyzed by an inspirational leader, but that’s exceedingly rare even if survivorship bias makes us think different. On the contrary, our tech graveyards are littered with bold bets that failed because leaders deluded themselves with yes-men.
ska 2y ago
“Figure it out” can work well, but only if it is predated by “what resources do you need” and a reasonable solution about that. If the “why can’t we do X” is “because we’re a team of 4 and already overburdened” there may not be any practical solutions.
- CSMastermind 2y ago
  I generally find that more resources are often the easiest thing to get and rarely helpful. Most of the time the issue is the "9 women can't have a baby in a month" problem where adding more resources is not going to make things happen faster - in fact it may slow things down. But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster. At its core software is not making a thing - it's inventing a machine that makes the thing. If you're Little Debbie and you have a machine that makes cupcakes it's hard when the business comes in and says, "now it needs to make fudge rounds." And no amount of extra people working on the problem will get that machine retooled any faster.
  - bluefirebrand 2y ago
    > But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster. People tend to understand that there's an upper limit to the amount of people that can be deployed to dig a ditch any faster too They just refuse to believe that with software, sometimes that number is smaller than they think it should be simply because people aren't physically getting in each others way
  - ska 2y ago
    Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all problems are solvable by throwing more resources at it, that clearly isn't the case. But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it. "Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page. "I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?" It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".
jareklupinski 2y ago
> "you asked me to move a dining room chair into the living room. Then you asked me to do the same with the toilet." > "figure it out" that's the kind of motivation that leads to someone making Armchair Toilet https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/11/34/ce1134ca396e43f55c84fbe16e9daa90.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/11/34/ce1134ca396e43f55c84...
- mey 2y ago
  Or a portable chemical toilet which is not uncommon in campers.
yed 2y ago
Since they referred to talking to “clients”, I’m guessing the problem wasn’t that the task couldn’t be done but that the client didn’t want to pay more for the additional work.
rolisz 2y ago
The problem is not the figuring out. The problem is the client paying for the solution.
GolfPopper 2y ago
"Get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri next year. Oh, and it has to have a crew of at least 20 people, who all return safely to Earth by the end of the decade." I'll leave you to think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible. Sure, sometimes you can re-define the goal. ("We need to know more about what's in the Alpha Centauri system.") But sometimes domain expertise means telling non-experts about reality. (Pi is not 3, no matter how much someone thinks it should be.)
Clamchop 2y ago
I've built you a toilet with a collection bucket that smells, needs regularly scheduled emptying into the other toilet, and it overflows anyway when you throw parties.
- dotancohen 2y ago
  Sounds like a good fit for a Crohn's job.
salawat 2y ago
Reply: what's my resource budget? Not figuring out something utterly pointless because you won't want to spend the resources to make it happen. See: the full rewrite/retool
- reaperducer 2y ago
  Reply: what's my resource budget? This resonates with me. I get a lot of "But Microsoft Office 365 Cloud does…" I tell them that Microsoft spent a quarter of a billion dollars on that item last year, and I'm perfectly happy to re-create it if they give me a quarter of a billion dollars, too.
dotancohen 2y ago
> Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Give me the budget that Steve Jobs gave to his engineers, and I'll figure it out too. The difficulty in what my clients are asking for is often not the feasibility but rather the time, monetary, and opportunity cost for ignoring other features.
- chubot 2y ago
  I"m not sure what "budget" you're referring to Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!) This is very well documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Steve Jobs e-mails Eric Schmidt (2007) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873 Steve mostly realized the good engineers want to work with other good engineers, no matter what they are paid He didn't actually give people "budget"
  - salamanderman 2y ago
    I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.
  - roughly 2y ago
    A budget is also time, resources, and latitude. Steve Jobs’ “Figure it out” was “I’ve given you a task, now go do what’s necessary to get it done”. This is what the post you’re responding to is referencing: the client is asking for something to get done but is not providing the resources required. As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make. * yes yes caveat caveat
hinkley 2y ago
Not everyone should try to be Steve Jobs. I had a boss who I’m now sure had aphantasia and his two best UI people would tell him something wouldn’t fit in backlog grooming, then we’d get to spend a week showing him all the different ways it doesn’t fit before he would shut the fuck up about it. We already “figured it out” in our heads because we are equipped to do the job. We were already doing some pretty sophisticated typesetting to make more things fit on the screen than really did. He was sure he knew where the problems were in the org and that they weren’t him.

klabb3 2y ago

While I agree this is an improvement, and that it respects the agency of the worker, it’s not enough. Pushing true boundaries may in rare cases be catalyzed by an inspirational leader, but that’s exceedingly rare even if survivorship bias makes us think different. On the contrary, our tech graveyards are littered with bold bets that failed because leaders deluded themselves with yes-men.

ska 2y ago

“Figure it out” can work well, but only if it is predated by “what resources do you need” and a reasonable solution about that. If the “why can’t we do X” is “because we’re a team of 4 and already overburdened” there may not be any practical solutions.

CSMastermind 2y ago
I generally find that more resources are often the easiest thing to get and rarely helpful. Most of the time the issue is the "9 women can't have a baby in a month" problem where adding more resources is not going to make things happen faster - in fact it may slow things down. But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster. At its core software is not making a thing - it's inventing a machine that makes the thing. If you're Little Debbie and you have a machine that makes cupcakes it's hard when the business comes in and says, "now it needs to make fudge rounds." And no amount of extra people working on the problem will get that machine retooled any faster.
- bluefirebrand 2y ago
  > But the business doesn't understand that software is not like construction where adding more people really will get that ditch dug faster. People tend to understand that there's an upper limit to the amount of people that can be deployed to dig a ditch any faster too They just refuse to believe that with software, sometimes that number is smaller than they think it should be simply because people aren't physically getting in each others way
- ska 2y ago
  Oh, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all problems are solvable by throwing more resources at it, that clearly isn't the case. But it's super common for a team to be asked to do something fundamentally outside their scope, and the asking client/boss not realizing that they are doin g it. "Figure it out" as a useful strategy sort of assumes that both sides of the equation are clued in about this and roughly on the same page. "I underwrote a great team, you should be able to figure this out (stop whining about it being hard)" is a fundamentally different statement than "Why can't you just do X, how hard can it be?" It's also worth remembering that the plural of "resource" is not "team".

jareklupinski 2y ago

> "you asked me to move a dining room chair into the living room. Then you asked me to do the same with the toilet." > "figure it out" that's the kind of motivation that leads to someone making Armchair Toilet https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/11/34/ce1134ca396e43f55c84fbe16e9daa90.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ce/11/34/ce1134ca396e43f55c84...

mey 2y ago
Or a portable chemical toilet which is not uncommon in campers.

yed 2y ago

Since they referred to talking to “clients”, I’m guessing the problem wasn’t that the task couldn’t be done but that the client didn’t want to pay more for the additional work.

rolisz 2y ago

The problem is not the figuring out. The problem is the client paying for the solution.

GolfPopper 2y ago

"Get a spaceship to Alpha Centauri next year. Oh, and it has to have a crew of at least 20 people, who all return safely to Earth by the end of the decade." I'll leave you to think hard and find a creative way to make it feasible. Sure, sometimes you can re-define the goal. ("We need to know more about what's in the Alpha Centauri system.") But sometimes domain expertise means telling non-experts about reality. (Pi is not 3, no matter how much someone thinks it should be.)

Clamchop 2y ago

I've built you a toilet with a collection bucket that smells, needs regularly scheduled emptying into the other toilet, and it overflows anyway when you throw parties.

dotancohen 2y ago
Sounds like a good fit for a Crohn's job.

salawat 2y ago

Reply: what's my resource budget? Not figuring out something utterly pointless because you won't want to spend the resources to make it happen. See: the full rewrite/retool

reaperducer 2y ago
Reply: what's my resource budget? This resonates with me. I get a lot of "But Microsoft Office 365 Cloud does…" I tell them that Microsoft spent a quarter of a billion dollars on that item last year, and I'm perfectly happy to re-create it if they give me a quarter of a billion dollars, too.

dotancohen 2y ago

> Steve Jobs would just say "figure it out". Give me the budget that Steve Jobs gave to his engineers, and I'll figure it out too. The difficulty in what my clients are asking for is often not the feasibility but rather the time, monetary, and opportunity cost for ignoring other features.

chubot 2y ago
I"m not sure what "budget" you're referring to Apple didn't pay well for most of its life, until well after iPhone/iPad success It was not like "FAANG salaries", which started around 2011, by my reckoning because Facebook didn't agree to the "Steve Jobs collusion" with Google/Intel/Pixar (ironically!) This is very well documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... Steve Jobs e-mails Eric Schmidt (2007) -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28699873 Steve mostly realized the good engineers want to work with other good engineers, no matter what they are paid He didn't actually give people "budget"
- salamanderman 2y ago
  I can't tell for sure if the "ironically" refers to it feeling ironic that Facebook didn't collude, or that Pixar did collude. If it's the latter, it's because Jobs was CEO and primary shareholder of Pixar and orchestrated it's purchase by Disney to get himself a seat on the Disney board. Ironically, if I'm recalling the biography correctly, Jobs made significantly more money from Pixar than he did from his first phase at Apple.
- roughly 2y ago
  A budget is also time, resources, and latitude. Steve Jobs’ “Figure it out” was “I’ve given you a task, now go do what’s necessary to get it done”. This is what the post you’re responding to is referencing: the client is asking for something to get done but is not providing the resources required. As a side note, engineers tend to be bad at couching conversations in these terms - nothing is impossible*, things just cost more or less, and that’s a decision for the money people to make. * yes yes caveat caveat

hinkley 2y ago

Not everyone should try to be Steve Jobs. I had a boss who I’m now sure had aphantasia and his two best UI people would tell him something wouldn’t fit in backlog grooming, then we’d get to spend a week showing him all the different ways it doesn’t fit before he would shut the fuck up about it. We already “figured it out” in our heads because we are equipped to do the job. We were already doing some pretty sophisticated typesetting to make more things fit on the screen than really did. He was sure he knew where the problems were in the org and that they weren’t him.